Destiny: Rise of Iron’s Launch Month Made More Money Than Original Game’s

The launch month of video game developer Bungie’s Rise of Iron expansion for its action-RPG Destiny generates much more revenue than the game’s original launch.

Since Destiny‘s second annual Festival of the Lost Halloween bash is currently underway, it’s safe to say that plenty of would-be Guardians are spending their time attempting to earn all of the seasonal rewards to be found within the event. Not to mention, Bungie has also given fans of the action-RPG plenty of activities to take on with the game’s Rise of Iron expansion, which has made more money in digital revenues in its launch month than 2014’s original version of the title.

According to the analysts at the marketing and research firm known as Superdata, Destiny‘s Rise of Iron add-on generated $59.1 million in digital revenues in September 2016, which is more than the combined physical and digital dough of $47.5 million during the vanilla version of the game’s launch in the month of September 2014. While this is definitely a big financial success for Bungie, what’s even more impressive is that these numbers don’t even take into account the sales of Destiny: The Collection, which houses all of the action-RPG’s content released to date, including Rise of Iron.

Looking at this more closely, this means that the digital-only iteration and lower-priced Rise of Iron expansion made significantly more cash in its launch month than the very first release of the base game for Destiny was able to generate. Not to mention, the vanilla version of the title was available across PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One, whereas Rise of Iron was not sold for PS3 and Xbox 360, allowing for an even slimmer market of gamers to pick up the expansion.

One has to also take into account the possibility that Destiny‘s current user base is likely much higher than those who picked up the title at the end of September 2014. Should that be the case, it seems as if Bungie has been able to keep the Destiny thriving long after its debut thanks to Rise of Iron, and previous expansions such as House of Wolves and The Taken King.

Superdata makes the definitive statement that Destiny‘s bread and butter is its new content drops for revenue, and just to show how sizable the sales for the launch month of Rise of Iron is, the regular version of the game raked in $7.2 million in digital revenue during August 2016. One can surmise that this number includes digital game sales, DLC sales, as well as Eververse microtransactions.

The analysts at Superdata conclude that Destiny is the current top performer in the console digital revenue space, and made mention of Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, stating that 80% of the militaristic shooter’s digital revenue since April has been thanks to add-on content. Taking all of this into consideration, it will be interesting to see how Bungie’s plans for the future in Year 3 will increase Destiny‘s bottom line.

Destiny: Rise of Iron is available now for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.